WAS PIUS XII THE “HITLER’S POPE”?
The facts negate this vile and often-made baseless allegation by those who are blinded by ignorance and/or anti-Catholic bigotry. Unfortunately, many people of good will, lacking reliable information, had fallen victims to this campaign of character assassination against Pius XII and the Catholic Church.
There was never any ambiguity on the Vatican Secretary of State’s feelings about Hitler’s regime, and the Nazis knew it. When Cardinal Pacelli was elected Pope on March 2, 1939, the next day the Berlin Morgenpost (the Nazi party’s newspaper) wrote: “The election of Cardinal Pacelli is not accepted with favor in Germany because he was always opposed to Nazism and practically determined the policies of the Vatican under his predecessor.” (2)
According to Mother Pasqualina Lehner, his close collaborator, Nuncio Pacelli said of Hitler: “This man is completely carried away; everything he says and writes has the mark of his egocentrism; this man is capable of trampling on corpses and eliminating anything that is an obstacle. I cannot understand how there are so many people in Germany who do not understand him, and cannot draw conclusions from what he says or writes. Has any of them even read his horrifying ‘Mein Kampf’?” (3)
During Pacelli’s twelve years as Apostolic Nuncio in Germany (1917-29), he made 44 public speeches and in 40 of these attacked the fundamental tenets of the Communism and National Socialism. Already in April 1933, as Secretary of State of Pope Pius XI, he sent an urgent request to the new Nazi government “not to let it be influenced by anti-Semitic aims.”
On April 28, 1935, at Lourdes, where he went as the Pope Legate, Pacelli said to 250,000 pilgrims: “They (the Nazis) are in reality only miserable plagiarists who dress up old errors with new tinsel. It does not make any difference whether they flock to the banners of social revolution, whether they are guided by a false conception of the world of life, or whether they are possessed by the superstition of a race and blood cult.” (4) Certainly, these were very strong words coming from such a consummated diplomat.
Hitler’s discussions with his closest collaborators, as well as the diaries and decrees by Goebbles, Bormann, Rosenberg and Himmler, denote that from the beginning Hitler and his followers were motivated by a pathological hatred toward the Catholic Church. All those who did not adhere unconditionally to their way of thinking and acting were considered and treated as enemies, who had to be annihilated, said Fr.Gumpel.
As Jewish historian Dr. Joseph L. Litchen wrote in the Anti-Defamation Bulletin for October, in 1958, commenting on Pius XII, “the new Vicar of Christ” said Litchen, “showed no softening after his election toward Hitler’s brutal policies; Pius the Pope was the same as Pacelli the priest.” (5)
THEY SHOULD HAVE BEEN RETURNED TO THEIR PARENTS OR RELATIVES.